Google’s Trust Crises Should Get Everyone Thinking About the Future Powers of Big Tech—Cyber Saturday

Good evening, Cyber Saturday readers. This edition is arriving later than usual as my flight to New York from the West Coast lacked WiFi…alas. Without further ado, here’s today’s dispatch, sent from terminal four at John F. Kennedy airport.

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Google’s trust problem is worsening.

Chief executive Sundar Pichai said as much at a recent company-only town hall meeting. “We are genuinely struggling with some issues—transparency at scale,” he said, as reported by the Washington Post. Pichai added that he is attempting to understand—and address—whatever may be causing the “breaking of trust.”

Appropriately enough, a recording of the remarks leaked to the Post—presumably by some disgruntled employee.

Google is not alone, of course; all over Silicon Valley tech giants are suffering crises of conscience, internally and externally. But Google’s famously freewheeling workforce has led the most prominent clashes to date—over new hires, supposed surveillance tools, politics, alleged sexual misconduct payouts, military work proposals, and more. (See my colleague Beth Kowitt’s exploration of the deepening rift in her excellent feature from earlier this year, “Inside Google’s Civil War.”)

It’s interesting to consider Google’s mounting trust crises in light of the company’s recent “quantum supremacy” announcement. Google researchers claimed on Wednesday to have demonstrated, for the first time, a major computing milestone: that a quantum computer under its control can blazingly outcompete any regular computer, or even supercomputer, at a special—if not yet entirely useful—computational task. The landmark achievement, assuming it holds true (there is some dispute), heralds a coming age when quantum computers will, if all goes according to plan, help develop new medicines, reduce energy waste, advance artificial intelligence techniques, and, more worryingly, render obsolete many current methods of encryption.

I visited Google’s quantum lab, a funky, surfer-friendly outpost in Santa Barbara, Calif., earlier this week. In neighboring counties, fires raged, ominously, as Google’s whizzes shared the fruits of their labor with about a dozen journalists.

During a Q&A session, one reporter asked why the world should entrust such promising—and potentially devastating—technology to the hands of Big Tech, given the widespread—and often warranted—backlash against the industry. (Imagine the following, troubling scenario: A private sector company develops a full-fledged quantum computer, effectively all-seeing eyes, able to unzip Internet data everywhere in the years to come.) The Google team responded by saying A) it’s still so very early, and B) they have committed to sharing as much as they can about their research openly. John Martinis, one of Google’s chief quantum scientists, offered that he hoped, by sharing this work, the world would take note and prepare migrations well in advance to newer, “post-quantum” forms of cryptography.

I followed up by asking whether the scientific community, in China and elsewhere, were sharing work as openly as Google’s team purported to be. Quantum crew founder Hartmut Neven, who was decked out in an ensemble more befitting an Electric Zoo DJ than a scientist, answered aslant, reaffirming the company’s policy of transparency. “Of course, it’s a delicate dance,” he said. “Openness makes us much faster,” but, “on the other hand, competitors can read what we’re doing and are getting therefore faster as well.”

Martinis added to this, reiterating the team’s philosophy. He said he only agreed to join Google—bringing along his whole lab from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014—after receiving assurances from Google cofounder Larry Page that the company would commit to openness. Page had told him, Martinis said, that he would rather succeed by sharing discoveries than fail in private.

The quantum computing efforts underway at Google—and at IBM, Microsoft, Honeywell, and elsewhere—are still in their infancy, to be sure. But one wonders how the world will cope with the anticipated arrival of these machines’ extraordinary, unprecedented abilities as they begin to come online. There’s not much choice, at the present time, but to trust tech’s overlords not to be evil.

A cold comfort for many, no doubt.

Robert Hackett | @rhhackett | robert.hackett@fortune.com